Letters From A Murderer: The Unsolved Mystery Of The Zodiac Killer

Committing at least five murders and taking credit for several more, the psychopath who called himself the Zodiac Killer terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.

He was never caught.

For the curious, here’s a brief account of his grisly crimes – the horrific killings and the disturbing letters, the bizarre ciphers and the demented demands made by a man whose identity, to this day, remains unknown.

Our story begins on the night of July 4th, 1969, at 12:40 p.m., when the Vallejo Police received a call from a man who spoke in a low, monotonous voice.

He said, “I want to report a murder. If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway, you will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9-millimetre Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye.”

That was the first of the many taunting messages the world would receive from the Zodiac Killer.

When they arrived at the scene, sure enough, the police found 22-year-old Darlene Ferrin and 19-year-old Michael Mageau bleeding to death in the car.

Mageau and Ferrin, a popular waitress in Vallejo, had driven over to the Blue Rock Springs Park earlier that evening when sometime around midnight another car came into the secluded parking lot and left, only to return minutes later.

According to Mageau, the driver got out of the car, shined a bright light and fired at the pair with a handgun, killing Ferrin and seriously wounding Mageau.

Mageau did not know yet how lucky he was – he’d stared into the face of the Zodiac Killer, and lived to tell the tale.

About a month later, on August 1st, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Vallejo Times-Herald each received an identical handwritten letter that referred to the December 1968 murders of 17-year-old David Faraday and his 16-year-old girlfriend, Betty Lou Jensen.

The teenagers had been shot to death near their car at a remote spot on Lake Herman Road, on the outskirts of Vallejo, California.

It began with, “Dear Editor, This is the murderer of the 2 teenagers last Christmas at Lake Herman”, and went out to give details about the gruesome murders that only the killer could have known.

For years, experts and amateurs alike have poured over the Zodiac’s baffling code in hopes that it would give us clues to his identity.

But the difficulty arises in the fact that an amateur, the Zodiac made quite a few mistakes when enciphering.

He made frequent spelling mistakes even when wrote in plain English, so converting his words to cipher made room for a lot more error. Naturally, this complicated things for experts working to break the code and despite intensive investigations, no arrests were made.

Though the list of suspects is by no means short, one name has the highest evidence against it: Arthur Leigh Allen.

When Allen’s trailer was searched, the police found a number of incriminating objects like bloody knives and homemade bombs. A friend of his even said that he’d heard Allen refer to himself as “Zodiac.”

Adding to that, Allen was jailed for child molestation in 1974, which is around the same time the Zodiac letters stopped.The case, however, still remains open.

Amanda Francesca Mendonça

After spending pretty much all of my teen years waiting for a Hogwarts letter that never came, I gave up and settled for being a wizard with words instead.
A hopeless romantic, when I’m not penning down short stories, I’m busy imagining my own happily ever after.